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This venue is closed.

Gwynnett Street, which opened recently in a
homely, brick-walled space on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, is another
deceptively scruffy Brooklyn establishment with outsize,
Manhattan-style ambitions. Like lots of joints in the neighborhood, this
one features a happy hour Mondays through Thursdays. Instead of fruity,
antifreeze-colored margaritas, however, you can get 50 percent off
cheekily named cocktails like Fool’s Gold (Herradura Silver, Luxardo
maraschino, lime) and the lethally smooth Bitter Truth (Plymouth gin,
Fernet Branca, grapefruit). A loaf of the densely delicious house
whiskey bread isn’t free, but it’s well worth the $5, and if you order
the ­pedestrian-sounding slow-poached-egg appetizer, it’s brought to the
table by your chatty, tattooed waiter plated with garden peas, sprigs
of celery lettuce, and little spiky antennae of what turn out to be
crispy, flattened pork fat.

The architect of these unexpected treats is Justin Hilbert,
who worked at famous kitchens around the globe (Mugaritz in Spain, wd-50
in Manhattan) before settling in this obscure ­Williamsburg corner.
Like other high-minded cooks of his generation, he has a fondness for
combining sous-vide-soft proteins (duck breast, strips of lamb,
Amish chicken marinated with hay ash) with endless esoteric vegetable
combinations (moth beans, gooseberries, etc.). Nothing my bedazzled
tasters and I sampled was disappointing, and some dishes (the sea
scallops with stinging nettles, the salmon smothered in an opulent
oyster cream) are themselves worth the trip. Some of the desserts
(coconut panna cotta with coconut “snow”; an un-spongy mint sponge cake
with pickled strawberries; a deconstructed, bizarrely tasty chocolate
ganache) seem overstudied by comparison, and may leave you pining for a
more standard, old-school dessert from the neighborhood, like chocolate
cake, or a simple bowl of vanilla ice cream. — Adam Platt